Day 167: Wednesday – Bleeds
Happy Valentine’s to all (both) of my readers! Today’s album was a recommendation that I listened to whilst driving back from a forest walk in the Kingdom of Fife, or the Fiefdom of Kings as I like to call it, but not very often because no one finds that to be particularly witty or fun. Wednesday’s newest album Bleeds was recommended to me as one of the best albums of last year, so I thought I’d give it a spin.
Album cover courtesy of Dead Oceans
Wednesday is a rock band from North Carolina that consist of singer and guitarist Karly Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, pedal steel guitarist Xandy Chelmis, drummer Alan Miller and bassist Ethan Baechtold. They’ve released six albums so far at a pretty snappy pace, with their first album Yep, Definitely having been released in 2018.
The album opens with “Reality TV Argument Bleeds” and you think you know what you’re in for when it starts with some Weezer-sounding guitars, but it ends up sounding not like I expected at all. It’s shoegaze-y noise rock album with country influences that occasionally sounds a bit like the Pixies or reminds me a bit of Pavement, but despite the older influences, it doesn’t sound like them trying to replicate something older. It’s still clearly new but with a pretty timeless sound.
One thing that makes sure you know it’s recent is the songwriting, which is country-style storytelling but from a very fresh angle, like on “Phish Pepsi” where the Americana sound is so soft and smooth that you don’t expect to hear mentions of things like Four Loko or the Human Centipede, but you do. But there’s also something else about it that sets it apart. I’d need to sit on it for a little bit to get there but I don’t have the time to ponder that today, maybe when I listen to their earlier stuff.
I’d listened to MJ Lenderman’s solo work before and I liked it very much, but I like this even more. I’ve been living under a classic rock where I’m just never really exploring the newer stuff, that’s one of things that I’ve really appreciated about this project and music writing more generally. I’m so happy to have discovered Wednesday through this. I love the little short stories of the songs on Bleeds and Hartzman’s voice is stunning. The band is going into semi-regular rotation, surely. Bleeds is a very strong 9/10.